Aristide Zolberg R.I.P.

[update below]

It is with sadness that I learned of the death yesterday of Aristide Zolberg, emeritus professor of political science at the New School. He was my professor and mentor during my first two years of graduate school at the University of Chicago, until he took up his appointment at the New School in 1983. He was a brilliant social scientist and whose presence at Chicago was one of the reasons I chose to pursue my graduate studies there. I was greatly influenced by his macrohistorical approach to comparative politics and shared his main academic interests, in European—and particularly French—politics and history, in ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and in the field of immigration (history, sociology, politics, and policy) and international migration, of which he was one of the leading social science authorities from the 1970s on. We stayed in touch over the years and saw one another off and on, in New York and during his many visits to Paris. We were very much on the same wavelength intellectually and politically. And I liked him personally. Here’s the announcement of his passing on the New School’s website

New School professor Aristide R. Zolberg, one of the world’s leading voices on the politics, history, and ethics of immigration, has died at the age of 81. Zolberg served as Walter A. Eberstadt Professor of Politics and University in Exile Professor Emeritus at The New School for Social Research. A distinguished political scientist and a preeminent scholar of comparative politics, the history of international migration, nationalism and ethnicity, and immigration policy in North America and Western Europe, he served for many years as the founding director of the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship at The New School.

Early in life, Zolberg experienced first-hand the perils of war, ethnic hatred, displacement, and exile. A Polish Jew, Ary was born shortly before the Nazis rose to power, and survived World War II under an assumed Catholic identity in Belgium. After the war he became a refugee in the United States, and earned his doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago.

Zolberg mentored and inspired several generations of colleagues and students at The New School, where he was first appointed as Distinguished Professor of Political Science in 1983, as well as at the University of Chicago and many other institutions where he held academic appointments. Zolberg’s book, A Nation by Design, remains one of the most authoritative accounts of immigration history in the United States and a compelling story of how immigration shaped this country. His humanity and erudition will be missed by countless colleagues, students, and readers.

Yes, he will be missed. There are few political scientists like Ari Zolberg left (in America at least), who have his erudition and intellectual and academic interests and range. Nowadays if one is not a mathematician, or prepared to become one, there’s no point pursing a doctorate in political science.

UPDATE: The website Deliberately Considered has tributes to Ari Zolberg by Jeffrey Goldfarb, Kenneth Prewitt, Michael Cohen, and Riva Kastoryano. (April 26)

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Mimi

Today is the 2nd anniversary of my blog. To mark the occasion I offer my first—and no doubt last—cute cat post. All blogs, even the most serious, are allowed at least one cute cat post. The cat here is our Mimi, who, as it happens, had her 10th birthday two weeks ago (I was originally going to post this then, as an alternative to marking the 10th anniversary of the launching of the Iraq war). Here are some photos of Mimi shortly after she came into our family (when she was seven weeks old).

With her papa.

She’s the nicest, gentlest cat I’ve ever had. Has never scratched in anger.

With her grande sœur (then age nine).

Playing with her “petit frère“

We gave our daugther a big cat peluche (stuffed animal) a couple of years before Mimi arrived. Mimi immediately started to play with it, so we dubbed it her petit frère. She drags it around the apartment in the clutches of her jaw, depositing it on our bed, the couch, my desk chair, anywhere (though only when she’s alone in the apartment or thinks she is).

Mimi at age ten, with her petit frère.

Mimi developed a bit of a weight problem when she was around two years old. As we live on the second floor up we couldn’t let her outside when she was in heat, so she never had kittens. During the third heat we had her spayed but at the wrong moment hormone-wise. So her excess girth got locked in. Nothing to be done about it. But we love her all the same.

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My car R.I.P.

My beloved 1986 Volvo 360 GL. La vieille dame. Today it died. Not literally: it started fine and could be driven no problem. But I had it towed to the casse (auto graveyard). There was no choice. Tomorrow was the deadline for the contrôle technique (inspection), the missing of which means cancellation of the carte grise (vehicle registration card), fines and fees into the hundreds of €, and all sorts of hassles and problems one does not need. My mechanic told me after the last inspection (two years ago) that the inspector decided to be nice and let it pass but that the next time major repairs would be demanded. And then last year I was informed that the joint de culasse (head gasket) had blown, meaning that I could drive locally but not outside the Île-de-France (no wonder the engine had been leaking coolant for the previous year…). Replacing the head gasket would have been more expensive than the market value of the car, not to mention all the other repairs to be mandated by the inspector. And don’t even mention body work (or all the other stuff that can suddenly go wrong in an old car). So I had set March 2013 as the deadline to replace the Volvo. As it had negative market value at this point, I couldn’t even give it away. So the casse was the only solution.

This is a sad day for me, as this was my car for the past 19 years. That’s a hefty chunk of my life (precisely one-third). And before it was mine, it was my father’s, who bought it new in November 1985. When he passed it on to me in 1994 it had 95,000 km on the odometer. Today it had just under 165,000 (that’s kilometers, not miles). Not much for a 27-year old car. As we live in an inner banlieue of Paris—and before that, in Paris itself—, use public transportation to go to work, and have food and most essential shopping withiin walking distance, the car was not taken out much. In recent years, once or twice a week on average (also, my wife doesn’t drive). And a significant portion of the 70K km I put on the odometer over the past 19 years was trips and vacations around France and neighboring countries (of which we took many when my daughter was younger). But one still needs a car and I had started thinking eight or nine years ago about getting a new one (or, rather, a more recent used model). But a reportage on France 2′s Envoyé Spécial (French ’60 Minutes’) several years ago made me decide to hold on to the Volvo for as long as possible. The reportage was on the repair costs of recent model cars with everything electronic and loaded with computer chips. One of the stories had a woman with her Renault or something and where the speedometer and odometer ceased to function. As her independent mechanic couldn’t deal with the new electronic stuff she had to go to the concessionaire (dealer)—already more expensive—to get it fixed. She was told the entire dashboard would have to be replaced. Cost: €800 (plus labor). I took note of this, as the very same thing had happened to my car a short time earlier. I took it to my mechanic (no dealer). The repair involved finding the wire from the dashboard and reattaching it in the right place. Cost: €57. That was it. I was keeping the Volvo until something major broke. And besides, Volvos are good cars! Properly maintained, they can go on for years.

But it was a gas guzzler, was rusting, the fenders starting to come loose, the rear right door not opening properly, et j’en passe. My daughter had also been increasingly embarrassed by it in recent years—her friends’ parents all have nice new model cars—and, I have to admit, I was slightly gêné myself parking in the lot at the last couple of weddings we attended (looking like the poor cousin from the sticks). So voilà, la vieille dame n’est plus. As soon as my leg is back to normal I’ll start looking for a new-used one (as given the frequency with which I drive, I cannot justify buying a new car). Donc si quelqu’un dans la région parisienne à une voiture d’occasion à vendre—fabrication allemande ou japonaise de préférence (mais pas française)—et pour à peu près €5000, faites-moi signe.

From our kitchen window.

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Blogroll

I finally have a blogroll up on the sidebar, with links to blogs I look at periodically to regularly and/or endorse. I’ll be adding to it as I go along.

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In France, Seasonal Workers With a Ph.D.

[update below]

The NYT had a salutary article the other day on a subject practically no one knows a thing about—except for the relatively small number of those directly concerned—, which is the plight of professors who teach in American study abroad centers in Paris—of their precarious conditions of employment, lack of benefits, and low salaries (and which one would presume is the case with American study abroad centers elsewhere as well). The increasing use of expendable, low paid, no benefit adjuncts in American universities is a well-known scandal—and that the article mentions—but is generalized in the study abroad centers of those same universities—and with lower pay to boot—, even though welfare states like France are supposed to offer working people a higher level of job protection and benefits. Not surprisingly, most of the professors interviewed for the NYT article did not wish to be identified by name, out of fear of losing their jobs. An administrator at one of the larger Paris programs declined to comment for the article. Of course he declined. What was he supposed to say? The responses of those who did comment on the record recounted a certain amount of bulldust. Two of the offending institutions mentioned in the article I know personally (their administrators and administrating faculty—almost all Americans—situate themselves on the political left almost to a man or a woman but when it comes to their actions as administrators and the values that guide them in their relationships with those whom they have the authority to hire and fire, they would be right at home on Wall Street or in any corporate boardroom). And then there are some particularly egregious offenders—real bad apples—the article didn’t mention. The situation is not all somber, it should be said, as there are study abroad programs that do indeed show commitment to their teaching staff (and their loyalty is duly reciprocated), but, malheureusement, these are in the minority.

UPDATE: AJE has a relevant article (April 11) on “Academia’s indentured servants.”

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Good fortune

Last week my blogging consœur Victoria Ferauge—a fellow longtime American resident of France—published a post on her fine blog of an experience she recently had with the emergency room of a French hospital, and in which she made some comparisons between the French and American health care systems. As it happens, I also had an experience with the ER recently, my first ever in France (and only the second in my life, the last in the mid 1980s). Exactly three weeks ago, during the season’s first major snowfall in Paris, I was walking home in the early evening carrying groceries, slipped on the very slippery sidewalk, and fell, and with my foot twisting around in the process. I was in great pain, it was dark, and there was no one around. Fortunately a couple of good Samaritans did see me and came to help. My apartment building was within sight and my wife was fortunately home, so she came with a neighbor to meet me. As I couldn’t walk—I had badly messed up my ankle—, the snow was falling heavily, and I clearly needed to get to a hospital, she called the SAMU. Within fifteen minutes or so an ambulance van of the sapeurs-pompiers (fire brigade) arrived and took me to the ER of a nearby hospital. While in the van a fireman asked for an ID card so he could fill out a form. At the ER the firemen waited with me until a member of the hospital staff came to take charge. They were nice, helpful, and, not surprisingly, professional.

I thought I’d be in the ER for several hours but was tended to fairly quickly, even though the place was full. The X-ray of the ankle showed a fracture, so it had to be put in a cast. The doctor (from the Congo-Kinshasa; hospitals in France would have significant personnel shortages were it not for immigrant staff) wrote prescriptions for paracetamol (which is sold over the counter but if one has a prescription it’s covered by insurance), five weeks worth of anticoagulant injections to be administered daily, and crutches (cannes anglaises). He also gave me the number of a private clinic around the corner from my place and told me to schedule an appointment with an orthopedic specialist there ASAP. I was then told I could go home. There was no discharge process and no one asked for insurance information. The fireman no doubt gave the hospital a copy of the form that had been filled out in the van, but all that contained was my name, address, and DoB. My wife, who doesn’t drive, was fortunately able to get friends who live nearby to traverse the snow-covered streets and and pick me up. I was in and out of the hospital in two-and-a-half hours.

As the temperature remained below freezing for several days I couldn’t venture outside on the icy sidewalks, so the appointment with the orthopedist at the clinic didn’t happen until eight days after the accident. He said more X-rays would have to be taken to determine the seriousness of the injury. The new X-rays indeed showed the injury to be worse than that what the original had indicated, thus necessitating an urgent surgical intervention. So the operation took place and I spent two not particularly pleasant nights in the clinic (it was only the second overnight hospital stay of my life, the previous one 38½ years ago, following an operation on the very same ankle, injured while playing basketball). I was discharged a week ago today and with a new cast on. As this was a private clinic there was paperwork and for which my Carte Vitale and carte de mutuelle were needed. Had I not had these—i.e. if I weren’t covered by the Sécu (which everyone legally living in France is) and didn’t have a mutuelle (which 90+% of the population does)—, I would have received a sizable bill from the clinic. But I won’t be receiving any such bill. I did have to write checks to the orthopedist and anesthesiologist for a total of €180 but some or most of this will be reimbursed by the Sécu and mutuelle after I submit the feuille de soins (my doctors are in private practice—though are conventionné, i.e. registered with the Sécu—and basically set their own fees). As for the prescriptions, the only one so far for which money has had to be forked over was the crutches (€29). The registered nurse who comes daily to administer the anticoagulant shots and take twice-weekly blood tests—a team of three infirmières à domicile, who work out of a neighborhood paramedical clinic that does house calls—is also conventionné, though I’ll have a write a check of around €100 for the service when the process is finished (though that should be mostly or entirely reimbursed by my mutuelle).

So now I find myself at home and with a cast on my lower right leg for another five weeks to go, and with instructions from the doctor not to put any pressure on the leg (i.e. absolutely not to walk on the cast, even lightly). Which, in effect, means that I cannot go outside until I see the doctor again in mid-March. I suppose I could try but I doubt I’d get very far walking on two crutches outside (getting down the four flights of stairs in my building would be tough enough and my wife wouldn’t allow it anyway). I have a prescription to rent a wheelchair—which can be done from selected pharmacies—in case I really need to go out, but haven’t yet done so. So I get around the apartment on the crutches but that’s it. In terms of work, I have an arrêt de travail—which would enable me to receive 100% sick pay—but as I teach university-level courses I didn’t want to invoke it. So I have arranged to teach my classes via Skype, which is working okay so far. It’s not perfect and there are occasional technical glitches but it’s the only solution I have. Thank God for technology.

Being housebound, semi-crippled, and unable to do much of anything apart from sit at my computer, read, or watch TV—I can manage in the kitchen but can’t do any real cooking, and can’t carry anything that won’t go in a backpack—is a bummer but I’m not feeling sorry for myself. Far worse things have happened to many people in the course of human history, including friends of mine and close family members. And it’s only for a few weeks. I think about the good fortune I have had in this happening to me close to home and as a citizen of a rich country with national health insurance. I’ve been thinking about such an injury happening to, e.g., a poor person in a poor country, to a Syrian refugee in a freezing camp in Jordan, or to someone in America without health insurance (and even with insurance, of the deductibles and other fees into the four figures, maybe even more; an American friend here joked that the ambulance in the US would have probably asked for my credit card rather than ID). But, above all, I think of the good fortune I have in having my wife and daughter (age 19). I don’t know what I would do without my family right now. My condition imposes burdens on them but they’re responding with good cheer. I would really be up the creek if I lived alone and didn’t have family nearby. I would dread the prospect of living alone at my age whatever the case, but a debilitating injury or medical condition adds an additional dimension to such a prospect. So, yes, I think my fortune is pretty good.

On comparing the French and American health care systems, my mother (age 82) wrote an account of an experience she had some four years ago when she came to visit me, and that was published as a guest post on the blog of a health policy specialist at Duke University.

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Eric Hobsbawm R.I.P.

[update below] [2nd update below]

There have been numerous tributes to him over the past two days. As he was still going strong intellectually at age 95, one can say that he led a full life—as for someone like Eric Hobsbawm, if one can read, write and discuss ideas, one is living fully. He was one of my references during my college-graduate school years and, like just about every political science-history inclined major of my generation, I read several of his books, including his famous trilogy of the long 19th century (1789-1914). And I saw him speak once, back in ’77 or ’78, at the Karl Marx Library in London (or maybe it was at one of the other lefty meeting places in town; can’t remember precisely). More recently I read his memoir, Interesting Times, along with the other members of my reading group, which we greatly enjoyed. One of his more noteworthy books that I have not read, though, is his history of the 20th century, The Age of Extremes. TNR has posted Eugene Genovese’s review essay of the book from 1995 (as it happens, Genovese died on September 26th). The essay is particularly interesting, as Genovese, like Hobsbawm, was a Marxist but, very much unlike Hobsbawm, became a conservative. I also dug up this review essay on the book—which is rather more critical—by Brad DeLong.

UPDATE: Age of Extremes and Interesting Times were reviewed by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books here and here. Interesting Times was reviewed by Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books here and here.

2nd UPDATE: Julia Hobsbawm has a lengthy article in the FT (April 19, 2013) on “Remembering Dad.” The concluding paragraphs

Despite being a secular Jew all of his life, he had requested that his friend the American academic Ira Katznelson from Columbia University recite Kaddish at his funeral. His mother, he told me, “always said to me: never deny you are Jewish”. So at the very end when Ira, fresh off the red-eye from Manhattan, read the most important prayer of the Jews, I knew that my Dad – unobservant of the Jewish faith in any way during his life – was keeping true to her wish and her memory now, possibly when it mattered most.

Our final goodbye as a family at Highgate Cemetery was marked mainly in silence. It was cold, but autumn was still flaming away in the trees in Waterlow Park next door. Earlier, as I was buying a small bunch of flowers to lay on the grave, I had an overwhelming sentimental urge to give my father one last thing to read: it seemed impossible that he would never breathe in ideas again. I bought the London Review of Books, which he had regularly contributed to in life and which featured, as it happened, his friend Karl Miller’s obituary of him. We laid the copy, fresh and folded, on top, and then the gravedigger finished his work.

 

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Capital vs. talent

Interesting op-ed in today’s NY Times on the NFL referees’ strike as a metaphor for the battle in American business. The author, Roger L. Martin, argues that the NFL team owners fought the referee union so hard not because the latter’s demands were costly—which they weren’t—but

Because the league was fighting a bigger fight, one that is representative of a war beneath the surface of the modern economy — the war between capital and talent.

Martin’s Marxist-ish analysis is refreshing in this age of neoliberal hegemony, particularly as he is not some tenured radical prof at U.Mass-Amherst or UC-Santa Cruz but the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Conservatives will likely retort that he’s Canadian so whaddaya expect? Martin’s recent book, Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL, looks most interesting. It’s published by Harvard Business Press Books. The publishing arm of Mitt Romney’s alma mater. I would doubt he’s read it.

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Gore Vidal

[update below]

I hadn’t planned to write a thing about Gore Vidal’s death, as I never read any of his books or followed him in any way. He didn’t interest me. And whenever I did read something by or about him, the subject was usually his flaky political views, and specifically his predilection for conspiracy theories—e.g. 9/11 “trutherism” and FDR willingly letting the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor—, which will definitively get someone labeled a crackpot in my book. And on the personal level, the man really did seem to be—pardon the expression—an asshole. But I’ve come across this piece in Slate by David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers, that is worth posting. Greenberg argues that Vidal should not be eulogized, as “he was a racist and an elitist, forever mourning the decline of his era of aristocratic privilege.” Ouch! I’ll post anything else of interest I come across on him.

UPDATE: In characterizing Vidal as an “asshole” I should give an example of this. Here’s one, from an interview with him in The Atlantic in October 2009

In September, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for leaving the U.S. in 1978 before being sentenced to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in Hollywood. During the time of the original incident, you were working in the industry, and you and Polanski had a common friend in theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan. So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?

I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?

I rest my case.

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Alexander Cockburn R.I.P.

[update below] [2nd update below]

I just learned that Alexander Cockburn died. Just seven months after his onetime confrère and fellow US-based British pundit-polemicist Christopher Hitchens. As I wrote a sort of tribute to Hitchens back then, I suppose I should write one for Cockburn too. I was a fan of Cockburn back in my gauchiste days and followed his writings closely, from 1979—when I first started to read him in The Village Voice—to 1984 or ’85, when I ceased to be a fan. I then came to despise him and for all sorts of political reasons, most notably for his defense of the Soviet Union and, in the 1990s, of the Serbs during the wars in the former Yugoslavia (for this, I wanted to punch him in the face). Unlike with Hitchens I didn’t see Cockburn’s writings too often over the past decade, as these mainly appeared on his flaky, ultra-gauchiste CounterPunch website, of which I am definitely not an habitué, though have seen it every now and then over the years, mainly when a gauchiste friend or two hurls a link from it at me. But Cockburn, like Hitchens, remained a great writer and despite his politics—when it comes to polemicizing with style, Brits are superior to Americans—, and took sensible positions on a few issues. And to his credit, I suppose, he rubbished the 9/11 conspiracy theories, which are no doubt adhered to by a sizeable number of his readers (not to mention CounterPunch contributors). (But then, anyone who gives the slightest credence to 9/11 trutherism seriously needs to have his or her head examined). The last piece I read by Cockburn was his farewell tribute to his frère ennemi Hitchens, which I thought was amusing and spot on. Too bad Hitchens isn’t around to write a tribute in kind to Cockburn.

UPDATE: A New York friend, who is well-known in progressive intellectual circles there, has written the following to me:  ”I stopped reading AC a long time ago. It was disgraceful that Counterpunch began publishing the likes of Israel Shamir, whose forthcoming piece apparently ‘reveals’ that the Dreyfus Affair had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.” (July 22)

2nd UPDATE: Ronald Radosh, who used to be a leftist—but hasn’t been for a long time now—, has an anti-tribute to Cockburn, whom he didn’t like too much… (July 24)

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Patrick Smith’s letter from Bombay

If one is interested in aviation and world travel, Patrick Smith’s blog, Ask the Pilot, at Salon.com is a must. Patrick is a professional pilot—currently for cargo—, travels the world, and blogs about it. About planes and the world. His blog is great. I’ve been following it for years. His latest post is from Bombay, a.k.a. Mumbai, and some of his observations and experiences are precisely those I had on my last visit to that impossible hellhole of a city over twenty years ago, notably on the several hundred square mile sewage dump in the Arabian Sea one overflies on the landing approach to the airport—a sight that has to be seen to be believed—and the city’s nightmarish traffic. He apparently didn’t take the suburban train from Victoria station to the city’s northern districts, where one passes through the most appalling shantytowns one will see anywhere on this planet. I went into the heart of the poorest quarters of Mexico City and Cairo in the mid 1980s, which were positively high class compared to those in Bombay. My father lived in Bombay during his high school and undergraduate university years. His memories of the city were fond. Likewise for Salman Rushdie. Bombay must have been a fine, even exhilarating, city back then. Le bon vieux temps.

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Rybnik, województwo śląskie

In case anyone was wondering—not that I expect too many were—here’s what I was up to last week (last Thursday at any rate).

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The Future of Cars

Voilà some free publicity for a sharp new web site, The Future of Cars, launched by a friend, Roger Kerson.

TheFutureofCars is a reported blog on the greening of the U.S. auto industry. I’m interested in public sector regulation, private sector innovation, and how the two will intersect in the coming years to create dramatically different – and more sustainable – vehicles for personal and commercial transportation.

Roger was a long time pubic relations director for the United Auto Workers in Detroit, so knows the subject well. He is also a smart and lucid analyst. Some ten years ago he gave me one of the more interesting explanations I had heard of the structural decline of American trade unions. As he described it, the generous fringe benefits—health care, pensions, etc—enjoyed by the unionized American working class in the postwar decades was almost entirely borne by the corporations with which the UAW and other industrial trade unions negotiated the generous labor contracts. This model made it so that in America’s minimalist welfare state unionized workers in heavy industry lived in little Swedens—that was his expression—and that the model continued even as wages were frozen or slashed and industry started delocalizing to the South, Mexico, and further afield. The model, he said, was unsustainable, as American corporations operating in a globalized competitive environment simply could not assume on their own the Swedish-like welfare state benefits enjoyed by their unionized workers. Ultimately something would have to give. Either American industry would be further battered by foreign competition—and with the consequences of that for jobs etc—or the unions would be forced into more give backs. So what was the solution? Not to slash benefits, of course, but to shift the financing of these mini welfare states to government via taxation and generalize it to the entire population. Make all of America like Sweden. Okay, maybe not completely—Swedish levels of taxation are not too realistic in the US—, but something in that direction. Starting with universal health insurance. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

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Footnotes vs. endnotes

I came across this great post on the blog of Christian Brady, a professor of ancient Hebrew at Penn State, exalting footnotes over endnotes. Professor Brady loathes endnotes and so do I. My hatred of endnotes, which goes back three decades, knows no bounds. I can deal with them in short articles but not at all in books. Having to constantly move back and forth from the text to the back of the book is a pain in the ass, particularly if the notes are substantive. À propos, footnote 2 in the item above is absolutely on the money. There is no argument for endnotes over footnotes. None whatever. Endnotes should be abolished. Period.

BTW, in his post Prof. Brady links to what he says is the best footnote ever (and it is quite good). In the text of the note the author concludes that the said note may be the longest one ever written. Not the case. I had two footnotes in my doctoral dissertation that were longer. By at least a full page each.

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Christopher Hitchens R.I.P.

[updates below]

Everyone is writing about Christopher Hitchens today, or so it seems, so I will too. I never rubbed elbows with him or saw him speak, and—starting with the negative stuff—came to detest him in the ’90s for his irrational hatred of Bill Clinton and cheerleading the latter’s 1998 inquisition by the unspeakable Kenneth Starr and congressional GOP.  And then there was his 100% support of the Iraq war and of Bush’s reelection 2004 (before he sort of flipped to Kerry in the final week of the campaign; he couldn’t make up his mind). I wasn’t too hard on some of the liberal hawks for their wrongheaded position on Iraq, as a few of their arguments were not without merit—notably from those who had longstanding ties to the Kurds—, and they tended to acknowledge the objections of those who opposed the war. But Hitchens didn’t give an inch on Iraq and seemed contemptuous of those who didn’t share his views. I also gagged when reading about some of the Republican habitués of his dinner parties. It’s one thing to break bread with, say, David Frum, who at least has some intellectual pretensions and is, politically speaking, not a totally odious SOB. But Grover Norquist?? WTF is an intello of Hitchens’ bent doing socializing with someone like that? I should also note Hitchens’ apologia for the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, which had me moaning in dismay.

But… Hitchens was a brilliant writer and intellectual, and I never stopped reading him. I looked forward to his columns in Slate, articles in Vanity Fair, and review essays in The Atlantic Monthly, and always enjoyed them. I first came across him in the New Statesman in the late 1970s. I followed his dispatches from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in 1980 and became a fan from that point on, reading him weekly in The Nation when he moved there from the NS. Even when my detestation started I found myself in agreement with him more often than not. I think he went overboard in his obsession with “Islamofascism”—a neologism devoid of social scientific value—but greatly appreciated his support of Salman Rushdie after Khomeini’s fatwa, his stance on the 2006 Danish cartoons brouhaha, and uncompromising defense of free speech in the face of Islamists and their apologists on the European and North American left. So much of what he wrote was simply excellent and with perspectives that were quite original (for me at least). One example that always comes to mind here is his demolition of the charlatan André Malraux (the BHL of his era), who is, not surprisingly, still respected in France. But what most impressed me about Hitchens was his superhuman productivity, of his ability to knock off several thousand words a day of beautiful prose, reading I don’t how many books a week, while maintaining an active social life and doing everything else he did, and after having consumed a quantity of whiskey that would have had me unable to talk coherently, let alone write anything comprehensible. I was totally in awe of this.

A lefty friend of mine who knew Hitchens wrote to me today about how he continued to like him personally despite their profound political differences. I’ve read similar sentiments from others who knew him. A few months ago I was forwarded an e-mail that Hitchens wrote to a friend of his (a well-known American intellectual). I was impressed by his letter-writing (or e-mail writing) style. Warm and personable.

Here’s a remembrance of Hitchens by Christopher Buckley, that a number of people have posted on Facebook today. And this by David Corn, formerly of The Nation.

UPDATE: Here’s a piece by Larry Derfner in the lefty Israeli webzine +972, on how “Hitchens was unfairly castigated by the Left for supporting Iraq war.” He makes valid points, though I will still castigate Hitchens for Iraq, and particularly for his arrogance over the issue.

2nd UPDATE: John Cook has a spot on commentary in Gawker on “Christopher Hitchens’ unforgivable mistake” (on Iraq, what else?).

3rd UPDATE: Here’s a good one by Scott McLemee, “Hypocritchens: Where did the literary luminary go wrong?”

4th UPDATE: A friend of Hitchens’ of over 40 years, Neal Pollack, tells some interesting stories.

5th UPDATE: Michael Lind, in a not nice tribute, says that Hitchens was a “gossip columnist of genius,” not a real intellectual. Ouch!

6th UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald, arguing, as did Hitchens, that one need not avoid speaking ill of the dead if they are public persons, speaks ill of Hitchens and then some.

7th UPDATE: I have a question, BTW. Did Hitchens know any foreign languages? His writings are peppered with French words but I have never seen any evidence that he actually knew the language. Nor do I remember a single time when he came to France, where he was unknown. Reporting trips to various countries aside, he seemed to spend all his time in the US and UK, and mainly in Washington. How boring.

8th UPDATE: Alexander Cockburn says farewell to C.H., his onetime confrère.

9th UPDATE: In in interview in Salon dated 10/10/12, Camille Paglia—of whom I am not necessarily a fan—has this to say about Hitchens: “That kind of sneering at religion that Christopher Hitchens specialized in, despite his total ignorance of religion and his unadmirable lifestyle, was no model for atheism. I think Hitchens was a burden to atheism in terms of his decadent circuit of constant parties and showy blather. He was a sybaritic socialite and roué — not a deep thinker — whose topical, meandering writing will not last.”

10th UPDATE: Gregory Shupak has a review in the 17 Jan. 2013 In These Times of lefty blogger Richard Seymour’s book Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens, in which Hitchens is portrayed as “an intellectually lazy poseur and a huffy racist—a man who, despite the remarkable breadth of his reading, ‘often lacked depth’ and was ‘either unable or unwilling to cope with the sorts of complex ideas that he occasionally attempted to criticize.’” Hitchens, “an intellectual opportunist,” was also “a serial plagiarist who failed to get even the simplest of facts right, was allergic to nuance, and made no scholarly contributions.”… Devastating stuff. Seymour really does take Hitch to the cleaners.

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Oil’s new world order

[update below]

A very interesting op-ed by Daniel Yergin in The Washington Post, on the future of the world oil market. This is one of those rare op-eds where one learns something new and important. No one knows the subject better than Yergin. I read his book on the history of oil, The Prize, some fifteen years ago. A great read. One of these days I’ll get around to the sequel, which came out just last month.

UPDATE: Chrystia Freeland, global editor at Reuters, has an analysis in the NYT of “the coming oil boom.” And Walter Russell Mead has a post on his blog on “what [the US] should…do with all this new energy.” (August 10, 2012)

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Hecklers

Dahlia Scheindlin, who writes for the progressive Israeli webzine +972, had a column the other day on the heckling of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in London last week by BDS activists and how this “spews hatred, not solutions.” She begins

For the record: I cannot stand the disruption of public speeches, forums, performances and events by hecklers. There’s something about the screaming face of the heckler, the flapping arms and confused camera angles trying to find the source, that I find repulsive. I hate watching the discomfort of the speaker, performer, or politician, I hate the audience’s non-comprehending wonder or its shame on behalf of the performers.

I don’t think I risk any street cred; my active opposition to Israeli policies are open and available for anyone to read. I often try to ground my arguments in sober analysis – sorry if it gets boring sometimes – so that rational people who don’t agree with me might consider listening.

And I feel that the hecklers undo all of our work.

Absolutely. I have a lifelong hatred of hecklers and a strong desire to punch the SOBs in the face whenever confronted with them. Hecklers are despicable, miserable lowlifes. Whenever I read about hecklers I think back to the 2005 referendum campaign in France over the European Constitutional Treaty, of a small rally I attended of the oui de gauche at the town hall in Sèvres, with Jack Lang and Daniel Cohn-Bendit the featured speakers. The audience was older and middle class. The event was disrupted throughout by two loutish, hard leftist hecklers opposed to the Treaty, particularly during Cohn-Bendit’s talk (French hard leftists have a visceral hatred of Cohn-Bendit, who is viewed as some kind of traitor to leftism; personally, I think he’s great). What was striking was that no one did anything for the longest time, until finally a male in authority escorted the hecklers to the door. I attended rallies of all four currents during the campaign: oui de gauche, non de gauche, oui de droite, non de droite, i.e. of supporters and opponents of the Treaty on both halves of the political spectrum. This was the only one that was disrupted.

The hecklers of course knew that all they risked was being led outside. Hecklers are cowards, choosing to disrupt only events attended by staid, politically mainstream, and/or mostly older audiences. E.g. the week after the oui de gauche event, I attended a rally of the non de gauche in Créteil—which has a more populaire demographic than upscale Sèvres—, with around two hundred in attendance. It was the petit peuple de gauche in all its splendor: working-class public employees, CGT and FO activists, Communist and Trotskyist militants, and other sundry hard leftists. It was a horror show, with each speaker seemingly trying to outdo the other in demagoguery and mendacity. If there were supporters of the Treaty in the audience, they knew well not to show it (and certainly not if they spoke with an English, German, Scandinavian, or eastern European accent, let alone an American; that would not have been a good idea). And if a supporter of the Treaty had started to heckle, I guarantee that rather than being escorted out of the hall he (or even she) would have been immediately set upon by members of the audience and subjected to bodily harm. Can one imagine what would happen if pro-Israel hecklers tried to disrupt a BDS rally? Hah!

In re to the above photo, it is of pro-Palestinian hecklers trying to shout down a speech by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at UC-Irvine last year. The punks should have been expelled from the university illico (were they? I rather doubt it). The below photo is of members of the audience enraged by the hecklers. I would have been with them, you may be sure of that.

But lest one think I’m only into bashing pro-Palestinian hecklers, here’s one of Ligue de Défense Juive (French JDL) hooligans breaking up a pro-Palestine public meeting at the mairie of Paris’ 14th arrondissement this past May (and whose action was defended by this right-wing Zionist group). The title of the event: “Palestine: a popular non-violent resistance” (co-sponsored by the venerable Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, founded during the Dreyfus Affair). One of the speakers I know personally. If I’d been there I’d have been strongly tempted to go into action against the LDJ goons.

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A burning issue

Slate.com has an article on an issue that has been driving me nuts for years now: on whether or not commas and periods should be placed inside quotation marks—à l’américaine—or outside, as do the Brits. E.g. “to be or not to be,” or “to be or not to be”. I go back and forth, sometimes mixing both in the same text, which is not desirable. The British way is more logical but it doesn’t look right. It bothers me. But so does the American. I can’t figure this one out. I am resolved for the time being to follow the American way, not only as that’s what I am but also because that’s what The Chicago Manual of Style—my bible in such matters—says to do. But then, the Chicago Manual says to put colons and semi-colons outside the quotation marks, which seems inconsistent…

In French all punctuation is outside the guillemet, e.g. when I told my students today about the time President Sarkozy behaved uncivilly toward a citizen, telling him « Casse-toi pauvre con ».  The period always outside.

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The Naked Anthropologist

I just learned about this blog, The Naked Anthropologist: Laura Agustín on Migration, Trafficking and Sex. Looks interesting. And original. Great title in any case. Et il y a des billets en français en plus. (h/t Paul Amar)

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Academic blogs

The NYT has an article on academic blogs, mentioning seven of the better known ones (of which I occasionally look at two). Mine is not quite in the same league as these and no doubt never will be. One gets 14 million hits a month. I’m presently four figures short of that.

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